“If you look at the history of fashion for larger women, it was either invisible or ghettoized or unbelievably frumpy,” Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, an associate professor of history at the New School in New York, said in a phone interview. “The Forgotten Women as a store for attractive high-end plus-size clothing was a radically inclusive concept at the time from the perspective of fat women deserving to think of themselves as feminine, fashionable people who would be deserving of going on a splurgy shopping trip.”

Ms. Radmin approached Seventh Avenue manufacturers, many of whom referred to her as “crazy Nancye,” to have some of her favorite clothes made for plus sizes.

She also urged designers to create more plus-size clothing. Some, like Oscar de la Renta, took a bit of convincing, but even he created evening dresses for her stores, as did Geoffrey Beene, Bob Mackie and Pauline Trigère.

The Forgotten Women boutiques had a “Sugar Daddy Bar” for the female shoppers’ male companions to amuse themselves, stocked with Korbel champagne, tea sandwiches and miniature muffins. Celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Roseanne Barr, Nell Carter and Tyne Daly shopped there. Stores were strategically opened on shopping streets like Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills to show customers that they were just as entitled to spend money as their thin counterparts.

“We wanted to make the customer feel important, not embarrassed,” said Dane O’Neal, who worked in merchandising for the chain.

Nancye Jo Bullard was born on Aug. 4, 1938, in Nashville to Joe and Jane (Johnson) Bullard. She grew up on her father’s farm in Cochran, Ga., where he harvested peanuts and cotton. Her mother was a registered nurse.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/25/fashion/nancye-radmin-dead.html

Mr. Xi made no secret about what his ideal capitalist should be like. Ten days after the Ant I.P.O. debacle, he toured a museum exhibition devoted to Zhang Jian, an industrialist who was active more than a century ago. Zhang helped build up his hometown, Nantong, and opened hundreds of schools. Business figures in the Xi era, the message went, should also put their nation ahead of business.

In a July meeting with the members of the business community, Mr. Xi pointed to Zhang as a role model and urged them to rank patriotism as their top quality. (Mr. Xi reportedly didn’t mention that Zhang died bankrupt.)

Mr. Ma has his own high-profile philanthropic projects, like several initiatives in rural education and a prize to help develop entrepreneurial talent in Africa. But in many other respects, the flamboyant technology entrepreneur differs greatly from Zhang.

He has long enjoyed a better reputation than his peers in manufacturing, real estate and other industries whose edge may derive from cultivating close government ties, ignoring the environmental rules or exploiting employees.

He is as famous for making bold statements and challenging the authorities. In 2003, he created Alipay, which later became part of Ant Group, putting his business empire square in the center of the state-controlled world of finance.

“If someone needs to go to jail for Alipay, let it be me,” he told his colleagues at the time.

He sometimes subtly dared the government to punish his defiance. Regarding Ant’s business, he said on multiple occasions, “If the government needs it, I can give it to the government.” His top lieutenants repeated the line, too.

At the time, few people took these remarks seriously. People who know him well considered them a very “Jack thing” to say. “Giving Alipay to the country? Jack Ma is just saying,” read the headline of a 2010 opinion piece in the China Business News newspaper.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/technology/china-jack-ma-alibaba.html

Mr. Xi made no secret about what his ideal capitalist should be like. Ten days after the Ant I.P.O. debacle, he toured a museum exhibition devoted to Zhang Jian, an industrialist who was active more than a century ago. Zhang helped build up his hometown, Nantong, and opened hundreds of schools. Business figures in the Xi era, the message went, should also put their nation ahead of business.

In a July meeting with the members of the business community, Mr. Xi pointed to Zhang as a role model and urged them to rank patriotism as their top quality. (Mr. Xi reportedly didn’t mention that Zhang died bankrupt.)

Mr. Ma has his own high-profile philanthropic projects, like several initiatives in rural education and a prize to help develop entrepreneurial talent in Africa. But in many other respects, the flamboyant technology entrepreneur differs greatly from Zhang.

He has long enjoyed a better reputation than his peers in manufacturing, real estate and other industries whose edge may derive from cultivating close government ties, ignoring the environmental rules or exploiting employees.

He is as famous for making bold statements and challenging the authorities. In 2003, he created Alipay, which later became part of Ant Group, putting his business empire square in the center of the state-controlled world of finance.

“If someone needs to go to jail for Alipay, let it be me,” he told his colleagues at the time.

He sometimes subtly dared the government to punish his defiance. Regarding Ant’s business, he said on multiple occasions, “If the government needs it, I can give it to the government.” His top lieutenants repeated the line, too.

At the time, few people took these remarks seriously. People who know him well considered them a very “Jack thing” to say. “Giving Alipay to the country? Jack Ma is just saying,” read the headline of a 2010 opinion piece in the China Business News newspaper.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/technology/china-jack-ma.html

“There have been some stunning absurdities that defy logic and common sense,” China Economic Weekly said.

Yet there has also been progress. Two companies, Yangtze Memory Technologies and ChangXin Memory Technologies, are gearing up to put China on the map in memory chips, which store data. Local manufacturers of logic chips, which perform computations, are expanding production, largely for Chinese customers.

Those manufacturers might not have much choice but to serve domestic clients. Some multinational chip makers are starting to think twice about working with Chinese suppliers and partners out of concerns about intellectual property theft, said Randy Abrams, a tech analyst with Credit Suisse.

“International companies are becoming more wary about the I.P. leakage in China,” he said.

Mr. Liu, the start-up founder in Shenzhen, does not deny being motivated by a certain patriotic purpose. Emblazoned atop the website for his company, Tsinghon, is a proud reference to the Mao-era project that produced China’s first atomic bomb, ballistic missile and satellite:

Inherit the Spirit of “Two Bombs, One Satellite”

Be Self-Reliant and Bold in Forging Ahead

Mr. Liu says the sense of national mission does not conflict with his work serving customers and putting out competitive products. He does acknowledge, when he looks at the sky-high valuations for some chip start-ups, that irrationality has crept into the market.

“There is definitely a bubble in China,” he said. “But you can’t overgeneralize.”

The government, he said, is trying to hold local authorities more accountable for bad investments. And the torrent of money might at least persuade more skilled engineers in China to work on chips instead of video games and food delivery apps.

“Something is bound to accumulate, whether it’s equipment, talent or factories, right?” Mr. Liu said. “If not you or the other guy, then it will be someone else who ends up using it. I think this might be the government’s logic.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/technology/china-semiconductors.html

Even when the pandemic subsides and events again take place, few expect revenues to match those of the “before times” until 2022 or even 2023, Mr. Fiscus said. It will take time for corporate and personal clients to feel secure scheduling a big event, in part depending on vaccination rates and because of lingering unease over large gatherings.

Additionally, corporate clients have “realized this year that they can retain a lot of profit by not doing events, so we need to stay diverse and continue to innovate,” Mr. Starkey said.

And while many corporate, and some individual, clients have paid it forward by rescheduling for 2021 or even 2022, future bookings cannot replace revenue from canceled parties. “There is a huge waiting game for us in the entertainment industry,” Mr. Fiscus said. “And the longer the pandemic goes on, the more tenuous it gets.”

In the interim, while the entertainers expressed personal sadness as well as concern for the contractors they cannot currently employ, they are trying to stay both engaged and optimistic. Mr. Martin volunteers regularly delivering food, gets corporate volunteers involved with communities in need and works with a social service agency, “almost for free,” to plan parties for older adults. “The bright side,” he said, is that “instead of worrying about my business, I focus on others, like seniors who can’t get out of their houses.”

And Mr. Starkey has delivered food to frontline workers and has become something of a viral sensation, posting videos of him dancing with his daughters, one of which got close to 14 million views on his Facebook page. He works with his co-founders, Nicole Marsh and Rikki Mor. Ms. Mor said she regularly checked in with the musicians and D.J.s they relied on, because many were struggling, if not financially, then emotionally.

For many, the biggest loss is one of professional and personal fulfillment. “I miss working,” Ms. Wrubel said. “What I didn’t realize until it was completely gone, is how much joy it gave me to being around people who are laughing and dancing.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/business/smallbusiness/corporate-events-djs-pandemic-cancelations.html

The coronavirus pandemic has taken a brutal toll on the U.S. economy. Job losses resulting from the health crisis wiped out years’ worth of gains, hitting women, people of color and lower-paid workers already vulnerable to economic swings the hardest. An estimated 60 percent of businesses — about 100,000 individual establishments — that closed their doors temporarily as a result of Covid-19 have shut down for good, and more may follow in the months to come.

It is going to be a bleak winter for many businesses. And although hope is on the horizon in the form of vaccines, the toll is expected to get worse before it gets better.

Given the limited number of initial doses and rising case numbers in the United States, “the reality is, December and January and February are going to be rough times,” Dr. Robert Redfield of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said recently. “I actually believe they’re going to be the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation.” That means the economy will suffer as well.

As part of the DealBook D.C. Policy Project, The New York Times gathered a virtual panel of experts in early December to debate the priorities for economic policy in the months and years ahead. The consensus was that a huge aid package is necessary now to keep households and businesses afloat. In Washington, lawmakers said they were making “significant progress” in stimulus talks, but the negotiations hadn’t yet yielded a deal of any size. And once the pandemic has been brought under control and it’s safe for in-person activity to resume, policymakers must figure out how to fix a shattered economy — and better yet, to safeguard it against the next catastrophe.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/business/dealbook/economic-policy-debate.html

“I’ve had some good ones in the past,” Ms. Kilgore said. “I’m proud of them all. But Beauty Pie? Beauty Pie eclipses the rest.”

Beauty Pie, which has its headquarters in London, began operations four years ago, is a buyers’ club for beauty addicts. Members pay a monthly membership fee for backdoor access to some of the world’s best fragrance, skin care and cosmetics factories, many of which supply big-name luxury brands that go on to charge sky-high multiples for the products once they are stamped with their logo. With Beauty Pie, members can get regular deliveries of Japanese skin cleansers and South Korean serums, Italian lipsticks and perfumes sourced from Grasse in France, all of which arrive in signature rosy pink packaging.

The idea came to Ms. Kilgore one afternoon in a Milan train station as she made her way back from a beauty manufacturing region in Italy known as Lipstick Valley. She had about $5,000 worth of free samples from local factories in a shoulder bag.

“I suddenly thought, ‘What if all the women who usually buy these products in Sephora or department stores could have this feeling that I have right now?’” Ms. Kilgore recalled. “That they were getting a great deal by cutting out the middlemen. That they could access beauty at real cost, meaning they could go on and afford and explore so much more in terms of great products. I knew making customers feel good like that had real power, even if it would also put some noses in the industry out of joint.”

After all, making clients feel good is what energized her businesses from the beginning. Ms. Kilgore was born in 1968 in Saskatchewan, Canada. Her father died when she was 11. Money was tight, and after high school, she moved to New York with $300.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/fashion/makeup-without-the-markup.html

“The blanket shutdown is a little bit of a betrayal,” said Mr. Winterman, who had supported Mr. Cuomo’s strategy of targeting small geographic areas based on their case rates and hospitalization numbers. Mr. Cuomo undermined his case for a citywide shutdown when he acknowledged that restaurants and bars accounted for less than 2 percent of new Covid cases, while saying that “74 percent of new cases are coming from household gatherings and living room spread.”

Outdoor dining, which is allowed to continue for now, would be safer in theory if all restaurants were following regulations that call for at least half the wall areas to be left open. But many aren’t, and enforcement has been scarce. The colder it gets, the more the streets and sidewalks are covered by dining areas so fully walled in by plywood and plexiglass that anyone who sits in them is, as far as the virus is concerned, eating inside a restaurant.

Mr. Cuomo did promise to extend the moratorium on commercial evictions, which would have expired on Jan. 1. Congress did pass the CARES Act, which wasn’t perfect but kept many unemployed restaurant workers afloat, as long as they weren’t undocumented. But the Paycheck Protection Program was a disaster for many restaurants, as industry groups pointed out, repeatedly, each time Congress had a chance to fix it, and declined. Another bill that would budget up to $120 billion to bail out independent restaurants and bars is slowly gathering cobwebs in Washington. Congress hasn’t explicitly told restaurants to drop dead yet, but then the year is not quite over.

Hellish though this is for restaurateurs, it’s no better for their employees, whether current or former. Those who were not hired back when dining rooms were allowed to run at 25 percent of capacity but were hoping to return when the limit was raised to 50 percent or higher must now be worried that they won’t have jobs before spring. Many of those who were waiting tables indoors were facing stressful conditions and an elevated risk because they had to spend their whole shifts breathing the same air as customers who took their masks off the minute they sat down.

Some of those servers may be able to get work outdoors. Will their tips cover the cost of the cold-weather gear they’re going to need when winter really digs in? Already in the past two weeks, with early-evening temperatures in the high 30s and low 40s, the crowds have been thin. Most outdoor tables are empty long before the 10 p.m. curfew, although some owners are asking to stay open later to make up for the lost indoor revenue.

The only silver lining I can imagine is that those jerks who won’t put their masks on when they’re placing an order may decide to cover their faces with scarves when it gets cold.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/dining/restaurants-indoor-dining-coronavirus.html

“It’s a crowded space,” Alex Katz, the founder of Two Chairs, which opened its doors with a single clinic in San Francisco in 2017, said of the mental health start-up scene. Nonetheless, he said, “because the problems are massive, we need a lot of great companies working in innovative ways to address the different populations, diagnoses and delivery of care.”

Mr. Katz, another Stanford graduate, began working at Palantir, the data analytics and software company, but sought to understand mental health services when his partner “was going through a tough time in her life.” He eventually quit his job and began to tap into his network of friends and family to understand the mental health care system.

He soon learned that one of the system’s biggest challenges was matching a therapist with a patient, something he thought technology could solve. Yet, after interviewing clinicians, he chose to start a physical clinic, rather than a virtual one. In trying to raise funds for his fledgling business, “I joke that I had three strikes against me: I was a first-time, solo founder of a bricks-and-mortar company in health care.” But from its inception, Two Chairs has relied on technology, using a frequently updated proprietary algorithm to match client and therapist after a prospective client’s first intake meeting.

Although both Ms. Safira and Mr. Katz initially focused on in-person care, with virtual therapy as a long-term goal, they had no choice but to change direction once the pandemic hit. Ms. Safira and her small team quickly had to shift from the Manhattan space they carefully designed and renovated, but never opened, to go completely remote. Within eight long days, she produced a remote platform to provide five types of services, largely group-oriented (one-on-one sessions will wait until the in-person location opens). Mr. Katz — whose company had grown to seven locations in the Bay Area, with a new one set to open in Los Angeles next year — also made the decision in March to continue his business by going fully virtual.

Because both had planned, eventually, to offer remote services, they already knew that the efficacy of remote sessions was already proven. David Mohr, the director of the Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, who has studied the issue, said that researchers had long found that teletherapy could be as effective as in-person therapy.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/07/business/mental-health-start-ups-teletherapy.html

“The folks that follow the tech space, they all know the data is king and we all know the importance of data,” Iguodala said. “And not just the importance of data, but how you use it and how you can use it to expand and build your company.”

When this year dawned, all data on the basketball side suggested that Iguodala would not figure in the N.B.A. postseason for the first time in a long while.

The Warriors traded him to the Memphis Grizzlies last off-season, after he had played in five consecutive N.B.A. finals, earning the finals’ Most Valuable Player Award in 2015. The trade created a standoff in which Iguodala and Memphis agreed that he would not report to the organization as the Grizzlies found a future home for him.

For a while, Iguodala appeared more often at the enterprise software company Zuora, where he serves as a board adviser, than on any N.B.A. radar.

“A lot of athletes that do this will stay on what we call the consumer side, the well-known brands, Apple, Instagram,” said Tien Tzuo, Zuora’s chief executive. “I work in more of a space of business applications, business software. It’s not as well known. And he just showed an incredibly strong interest in that. It’s not something that you might approach as a layman.”

The Heat acquired Iguodala in a three-team trade in February and, as he regained his footing, the coronavirus pandemic suspended the season indefinitely.

Iguodala, the first vice president of the National Basketball Players Association, helped coordinate the season’s restart in a bubble environment at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla., collaborating on protocols for a return and fielding phone calls from concerned players.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/07/sports/basketball/andre-iguodala-miami-heat.html